The sister of the 23-year FDNY veteran who died during the Deutsche Bank building last August is suing city agencies and contractors, citing their "wanton, willful, and reckless conduct" in his death. The Deutsche Bank building had been undergoing a slow dismantling process, and a worker's cigarette likely started the 7-alarm fire. Robert Beddia, 53, (pictured) and Joseph Graffagnino, 34, died on the 14th floor, when they ran out of oxygen (the FDNY tapes are......

Yesterday morning's rain caused a recently installed sewer main to burst, flooding the basement and parking garage of a Battery Park City luxury apartment building. Water levels reached up to 20 feet. Not only were car owners greeted with news that their vehicles were either submerged or floating on top of sewer water, hundreds of tenants at 90 West Street were evacuated. Fire officials explained that, per WNBC, "rain flooded a re-routed sewer pipe,......

There are many questions surrounding Saturday's Deutsche Bank building fire that took the lives of two firefighters. Were firefighters using outdated information? WABC 7 says that a FDNY report, which is used by fire commanders for planning how they will attack the fire, indicated that the building had 38 floors (when it was really 26) and that the standpipe was working (it wasn't connected). Did the FDNY ignore post-9/11 advice? The NY Times reports that......

The Deutsche Bank at 130 Liberty Street will start to be dismantled today. The 41 floor building's demolition strategy was approved in September, after many years of planning, toxin finding, and searching for human remains (the World Trade Center's south tower fell into the building). The Department of Buildings signed off on the permits this week, but the permits are only to remove the facade. The AP reports, "On Friday, workers will begin removing the......

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has approved the scaled down design for the World Trade Center Memorial . Last week, builder Frank Sciame had released plans for a revised and less costly plan that has been generally welcomed. But one thing that hasn't been resolved is how victims' names will be featured - the LMDC will have to decide on that later. And Newsday reported that the WTC Foundation has podcasts from "victim'sfamily members,......

If you want to be thoroughly depressed by the rebuilding process at Ground Zero in a matter of pages, versus a matter of years, Gothamist highly recommends reading New York magazine's cover story about the WTC Memorial and its architect, Michael Arad. It's an exclusive interview where Arad spill his guts about the process, but also gets worked over as one of the many egos in cast of a million egos and billion interests.......

It'll be an alley of cray architectural all-stars downtown! After turning over Freedom Tower reins to the Port Authority and getting a pretty sweet deal, given everything, developer Larry Silverstein has annointed British architect (and Sir) Richard Rogers to design Tower 3 and Japanese Pritzker-winner Fumihiko Maki to design Tower 4 at the World Trade Center. Rogers is making a splash in New York lately - he'll be designing the Javits Center expansion, the......

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has posted an animated video of what the deconstruction of the Deutsche Bank at 130 Liberty Street will look like. It won't be demolished; rather, it will be carefully "detoxified and disassembled" because it is still extremely contaminated after September 11, 2001. The video is very cool (once you get past why it has to be deconstructed), showing that scaffolding will go up for crews to clean the building and......

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation announced that the WTC rebuild "would necessarily involve significant traffic, noise and short-term air quality impacts during its construction period." Thanks for pointing that out! Gothamist guesses that it's the LMDC's job to put it on the books that they know these things, but we feel that most people might infer that building an almost 2,000-foot high skyscraper, a new PATH station, a memorial, new plazas, parks, streets, etc., would......

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has put all 5,201 entries for the WTC Memorial online at www.wtcsitememorial.org. We liked the concept for greg.org's entry - following the paths of people on September 11, which was an event for the victims as well as the survivors. greg.org also pointed out designs by architect Antoine Predock (above), artist Ross Bleckner and Tribute in Light collaborators John Bennett and Paul Myoda. The Times David Dunlap wonders why no......